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Ten years later, the killer who wore an orange wig and delivered flowers, balloons and death to pretty Marlene Warren still roams free.

A family devastated by a painted assassin's bullet still grieves.

But investigators are counting on time and technology to help them name the killer they couldn't arrest in 1990. They're preparing to use DNA testing unavailable then in hopes of closing the case.

"It would be nice to get closure - to find out who did it and make 'em pay. It's been . . . not easy," said Joseph Ahrens, Marlene Warren's son who watched his mother fall wounded in the doorway that Memorial Day weekend. "Knowing that somebody's out there who could do something like this . . . " Even after 10 years, the blue eyes that match his mother's well up.

Marlene Warren
(Palm Beach Post Staff Writer)

White face paint and an orange wig disguised a lot that day. But it was the beginning of sad revelations about the lives of Marlene Warren and the lead suspect, her husband, Michael.

Ahrens, then 21, burdened by a cast on one leg from an auto accident, somehow managed to jump to his mother's side when she fell. From the front steps of the family home in the affluent Aero Club, Ahrens yelled to the clown getting in a white Chrysler at the top of the circular drive not 15 feet away.

"I made him turn around - him or her, its hard to tell. I forgot what I said."

Then he noticed something he wishes he could forget. Those eyes. Those brown eyes staring from behind the paint. To this day, it bothers him that he can remember the eyes, that they are seared into his soul, but he can't identify the killer.

The clown got in the car and fled. Ahrens called 911. "I told them she got shot. I said the address, said it twice. Then I dropped the phone and grabbed the car keys. I didn't know what I was going to do."

Ahrens raced off, but couldn't find the Chrysler. By the time he returned, police and paramedics were swarming his home.

Ahrens called his stepfather Michael Warren's cell phone. Michael said he was on Interstate 95, headed for Calder Race Track. He was not the trigger man, police acknowledged. But was he involved?

Victim feared husband

Marlene had told her parents, her friends, even her son that Michael would kill her. She and her husband were having problems, she said. There was another woman. She wanted to leave him. Not three hours after the shooting, an anonymous caller told police they should question Michael. Too much circumstantial evidence kept pointing in the same direction for cops to rule him out. To this day, police say Michael and Sheila Keen - a woman they believe was his girlfriend - remain prime suspects.

Earlier this week, detectives in the Palm Beach Sheriff's Office homicide unit met about the murder that shocked Palm Beach County ten years ago today. Investigators talked about what evidence they had, what they had done 10 years ago, and what they can look at again today.

It's a shred of hope to Marlene Warren's family, who thought the cops had enough for an arrest in 1990.

"They were having problems," said Bill Twing, Marlene's stepfather. "If she would've left him, it would've cost him dearly."

After the shooting, the Twings spoke with investigators. “They suspected Mike had something to do with it, but they didn't want to say anything until we brought up what Marlene had said. She told her mother, 'If anything happens to me, Mike done it.' "

The Twings had a lot of time to ponder their daughter's haunting words as they watched doctors remove Marlene's body from life support, as they went through her things, as they helped bury her four days later, all the while enduring the sickening feeling that the killer might be right there in the home with them.

"I told Mike, 'I'm sure you didn't do it, but I'm sure you knew what was going on.' It was scary for us even staying in the house."

The Twings hired local lawyer John Witt to represent Ahrens in the disposition of the estate. Witt did not return phone calls. In addition to their $175,000 home, the Warrens owned about $1 million worth of rental property.

While Ahrens was made executor of the estate, Michael successfully argued that much of the property the pair owned was his. But the fortune the couple had amassed would soon begin to crumble.

'I realized she wanted to leave'

Without the probate case ever being settled, Michael eventually sold the couple's property, including the home they built. His mother bought one condo and a business partner got another. The H Street apartments in Lake Worth went into foreclosure.

"He quit-claimed the stuff to Joe that he couldn't make any money on," Bill Twing said. "But how's a 20-year-old kid supposed to pay those mortgages?" Banks foreclosed on most of those properties in the early 1990s.

Ahrens went to live with his grandparents in Las Vegas for three months after his mother's murder, then returned to Palm Beach County to build his own life.

"When I came back I moved out," Ahrens said. "I had a real hard time getting my stuff out of the house. I don't know if he didn't want me to leave or what. A couple things I bought for my mom, like some vases, he didn't want me taking any of that. I did anyway."

Not long afterward, Ahrens stopped working at Michael Warren's car lot and picked up work as a carpenter. He's building himself a house in Jupiter to leave West Palm Beach, where he knows too many people and too many people know him, he said.

"I go crazy sometimes. I think too much sometimes on it and get nowhere with the thoughts and get more confused than I already was," he said.

"I remember her asking, 'What would we do, where would we go, if we left here,' " Ahrens said. "I realized that she wanted to leave, but I didn't realize how far into conversations they were about it."

The murder investigation led police to Michael's car rental business, A Bargain Motors. What they uncovered didn't bring them closer to naming the killer, but it did put Michael in prison. He was convicted in 1992 on 43 counts of odometer tampering, grand theft and racketeering, a case that kept him in courts and in the headlines until he went to prison in 1994.

During the three years Warren was in prison, his list of visitors included his mother, sister and grandmother, and friends from the horse racing world. Ahrens says he never visited. When asked if he thinks his stepfather was involved in the murder, he shrugs his shoulders. A painful thought. "I tried to go see him about every week," said his mother, Joyce Clayton. "It was terrible - a long drive and long days. And sad."

When he was released in December 1997, Michael disappeared from Palm Beach County.

His mother said Michael occasionally calls her at her Palm Beach condo.

"I haven't seen him lately," she said recently. "He stays with one friend, one relative, then another." He never got back into business, she said. "You know, they knew that he didn't do it, but the husband or the wife's the first one you look at."

Ahrens says he hasn't heard from Michael in about five years. Sheila Keen's only address for most of the '90s was her family's home in Indiantown. A man there said Keen wasn't there. Warren and Keen, who repossessed cars for him, denied being romantically involved.

It's usually easy to clear an innocent man, detectives said. But Warren wasn't cooperating. And he'd instructed his employees not to talk to investigators.

"This case was a series of circumstances that pointed in one direction," said Sgt. Bill Williams, the lead detective at the time. "Just because you can point the finger doesn't mean you got enough to convict them. Had he let his employees talk to us, we probably wouldn't have dug so much." To the Twings, the news of their daughter's death was Marlene's haunting words coming true.

"She says, 'Mother, if anything ever happens to me, he (Michael) did it,' " Shirley Twing remembers. The last time she saw her daughter alive was two years earlier when they buried Marlene's older son, John, who died in a car accident. Marlene had made it a point then to share with Shirley and Bill Twing where money was hidden in the house, where in the floor-to-ceiling fireplace to look in just such a scenario.

"She was ready to leave," Shirley Twing says, her words still halting in her chest after all this time. Marlene called her sister two days before she was shot. "She was going to leave in a couple days. She knew about what's-her-name, Keen. He was running with her.

"They kept her alive until I got there," her mother said, remembering the next time she saw Marlene. "She was brain dead. She died on my birthday."

Kids feared clowns afterwards

That spring of 1990, the upscale Aero Club had only about 25 homes in patches along a grass airstrip where residents kept their airplanes. The closest house to the Warrens was unoccupied, its new owners not yet down from New Jersey. One street to the north, Debbie Brisson was preparing for a party.

"You could hear her son wailing," Brisson said. "It was just very eerie. The way this happened with the clown and the flowers and being shot execution style, it was so obvious to everyone in the Aero Club that this was meant for her," Brisson said.

"Children were afraid of clowns after that," remembers Sue Donnell, who still works in Wellington as an administrative assistant.

"We were hoping to get the state attorney to prosecute, but there was always some doubt as to who the trigger person was," said Williams, now a detective with the sheriff's economic crimes unit. "There's evidence, but like in any case, you always want more."

The crime scene didn't offer much. No gun, no blood, no fingerprints. Not even the clown costume was ever recovered. But a clown costume and a basket of flowers with Mylar balloons left in the dying woman's hands had to come from somewhere.

In a matter of days after the shooting, deputies knew only one Publix in the county carried those particular Mylar balloons. "It was at Community and Military Trail," Williams recounted. "It was just across the street from where the husband's supposed girlfriend lived. The clerk described the person as having long brown hair; said she paid for it with a $100 bill. This was purchased, let's say, about a half-hour or 45 minutes before the murder occurred."

Clerks at a Dixie Highway costume shop tentatively identified Sheila Keen as the woman who bought the same type clown costume two days before the murder, deputies said.

They linked the white Chrysler LeBaron to Warren's A Bargain Auto Rentals through a stolen car report filed a month earlier. A New York couple had rented the car from Payless Car Rental, but mistakenly called A Bargain, which also used the slogan "payless" in phone book ads, to get instructions on returning it. The couple told police they were instructed to leave the car outside the locked gates at Payless with the keys above the visor, which they did. They had second thoughts and when they returned to Payless the rental was gone.

Deputies found orange fibers and brown hair in the Chrysler and did DNA tests. But DNA testing was in its infancy 10 years ago. Today, the advanced tests may link a killer to the crime, deputies said.

"There's some other evidence that can be tested for DNA that couldn't be 10 years ago,'' Williams said, declining to specify what they'll test.

"We don't have too much to work with," said sheriff's Detective Bill Springer, who oversees the case now. "But all it takes is that one little bit - one small thing that could solve the case."